Course starts with virtual world field trips to educational sims in Second Life. Week 2 introduces Machinima and its educational uses. Week 3 is an adventure in the MMORPG World of Warcraft with an educators' guild. Week 4 wraps up the tours on the Bleeding Edge with emerging tech and education that includes virtual, blended and augmented realities.

Beverly gave us a serious amount to think about. Please post your takeaways, links, ideas for the future, musing, etc here. Ask the question you didn't get a chance to last night or thoughts now that you have a little time ot reflect.

Task Discussion

The conversation overall was just awesome! For me, it was really affirming and encouraging to hear about the cutting edge work being done and the efforts actually being realized in virutual environments.

Hearing about this work and the dialogue we had about it led me to consider, on a much more sophisticated level, how a virtual office setting could be designed to facilitate the work of coaching & educating beyond just providing a sense of shared space & ambience. I'm really excited by this idea of exploring more intuitive & effective ways of conceptually framing/organizing content, e.g. evolving beyond 2D flatspace presentation of written & video information to creating a 3D conceptual mindmap of content nodes & their relationships that can be seen and grabbed in order to be explored & worked with.

And dovetailed with this way of working within & collaboratively sharing the content/data, there's this evolution of new gesture based UI devices as well as even more sophisticated & intriguing UI devices like Emotive. It feels like we're on the cusp of finally being liberated from having to use mice and possibly even keyboards as UI devices.

There was so much more ground we covered during the discussion, but these were just a few of the key things I took away from it.

So instead of just working with information on a flat 2D space, the appearance/presentation of the data could transform as it evolves, e.g. data notes could dynamically grow in size as the amount or importance of data grows, or the info could be color coded, or presented with sound elements or eventually presented with tactile characteristics, each of these using our senses to learn and work with information in a more natural or intuitive manner, via the range of our senses that we use naturally to navigate & learn about the world around us.

I'm also imagining some neat & fun things that could be done if these elements could be incorporated into an Alternative Reality game brought into VW space as we had been discussing during our last gathering.

You have some good ideas to explore and follow up on to see how to make 3d elements in the 2d3d space. For my class I wanted to make a dynamic Gartner Hype Cycle that could be animated over time with real data. This idea is similar to how Hans Roslings made Gapminder.

An ARG could thread through a lot of ideas that were incorporated during the mooc.

Gridjumper's Livebinder on Machinima is a terrific resource. Prezi is interesting when done well. It is easy to use, but I have not made anything well. Not aware of Spicynodes. Sounds cool!

Yes, I think an ARG project could even serve naturally as a framework for a kind of innovation lab or 'skunkworks'. For example, if an ARG story were to take place in a sci fi or at least a near future context, it would provide a natural environment in which to encourage the development of these more sophisticated 3D elements and then to incorporate them into the game for the players. An episode of the game might also provide an opportunity for players to learn how to create/craft or modify their 3D interface devices themselves, thus providing a lab opportunity to learn how to build in the 3D environment and work with data.

Within the context of a storyline and series of 'quests', there could be numerous opportunities to expose players/learners to subjects and allow them to do & be. For example, the storyline setting or environment would provide a natural way to showcase these bleeding edge technologies we've learned about & incorporate their uses into the game play/learning experience. There could also be opportunities to incorporate subject elements like earth sciences, engineering, literature, art, etc. in a more robust way that would given players opportunities to learn and then apply their knowledge to proceed further on their quests, e.g. getting a chance to learn aspects of earth sciences & apply that learning in a 3D simulated setting as an earth sciences practitioner might within the context of the game's storyline & that particular quest thread. In a way, WoW's basic structure of quests branching off a main storyline could be used.

And given that ARGs are typically social in their nature, a social layer could be added onto the basic game experience to include accomplishment badges but also allow players to form community and be able to display their badges & 'ranks' for having learned certain subjects and accomplished certain quests/tasks. In a way, these badges & ranks could be used as a metrics system to assess how much learning was taking place or being achieved, taking into account how in-depth the teachings and how rigorous & sophisticated the challenges presented by the quests as far as the level of sophisticated & successful application of what was learned. So basically, a built in way of grading or determining how successfully something was learned.